Lucinda MacDonald hasn’t made direct contact with her abusive father Carl MacDonald for 20 years, but after a celebration of life for her brother Larry, whose death she blames on the old man, she starts receiving harassing phone calls from him. She wants to throw away her phone and contact the police, but her husband Josh tells her not to…
The phone calls began just a couple of days after Larry’s celebration of life. Every day, at least once a day, my phone would summon and—if I answered—I’d hear his raspy voice burrowing into my ear, clawing deeper and deeper into the thinking flesh.
That first time I tailspinned into utter shock and terror. How did he get my number? I wanted to throw my phone down onto the pavement and stomp it, as if it was a cockroach or a rat that had somehow wheedled its way into my purse, where it would spawn and infest and infect me if I didn’t kill it.
“Don’t do that,” Josh admonished, gripping me by the shoulders and fixing me with his gangster-eyes.
“Why not?” I shouted. “I’ll get another phone!”
“Yes, let’s get you another phone, but keep that one and—I hate to say this, love—but you’ve gotta take his calls, not always but from time-to-time.”
“Why the fuck would I want to do that?”
He sighed. “Because that phone is his only means of contact right now. If you cut the connection or refuse to answer, he’ll start looking for another way. He’s bat-shit crazy. He wants to get back at you…”
“Get back at me?” I howled.
“Don’t try to think it through, love,” he forced me to look at him, bracketing my head in his hands. “Bat-shit crazy. Just remember that.”
“I’ll go to the cops. Det. Drennan. Get a restraining order.”
Josh shook his head, like a teacher frustrated by a student playing stupid.
“Why not? He should know about this, shouldn’t he. It will help with his investigation.”
“Your old-man isn’t going to obey any restraining order, hon. How many times have you read in the news about a woman being assaulted and killed by a husband who was under a restraining order. For christ’s sake, it will only make him madder.”
He was right, of course. I slumped, all the fight gone out of me. He held me in his arms and rocked us consolingly. My fear subsided. Josh soaked it up like a sponge, calming me through some kind of emotional osmosis, comforting me like a child.
“What are we going to do?”
“It’s going to be hard, love. Really hard,” he warned.
“I know.”
“We’re going to keep him on the line, like a fish on a hook, and reel him in.” He ogled and squirmed like a cod flopping around in the bottom of a boat before you whacked it on the head.
“Stop talking in metaphor,” I shoved him away.
We laughed.
“Seriously, you’re going to have to play him, hon, until we figure out what to do. In the meantime, keep a record of every call and download his messages. Just because we’re keeping this secret doesn’t mean we’ve got anything to hide. Consider every exchange with your old-man as evidence. We may need it for our day in court, if it ever comes to that.”
“Where did you learn all this stuff?”
Josh looked nobly over my shoulder, an aristocrat posing for posterity. “My depths are in a different lake from yours, sweetheart, but they’re just as deep and just as dark.”
“Fuck off,” I shoved him again, and he received my benediction gleefully. If I didn’t love that man so much, I’d have to hate him.
***
Date/Time: 20100802-1143
Location: Oswego Street, Penthouse
CM: [Breathing heavily, not talking.]
LM: [Listening, waiting.]
CM: [In a taunting tone of voice] Why don’t you say something, sweetheart?
LM: I’ve got nothing to say to you. Stop calling me.
CM: Nothing to say? After all these years?
LM: Nothing to say. Ever. Stop calling me.
CM: But I’ve forgiven you. You don’t have to feel ashamed.
LM: [Listening, waiting.]
CM: My wounds healed up a long time ago—except the cuts to my heart, lovie. There’s not even any scars. You’re forgiven.
LM: [Listening, waiting.]
CM: Don’t you think it’s time we became a family again?
LM: We never were a family. You were—still are—a tyrant and a perv. Stop calling me.
CM: [In a sneering tone] That’s not a very nice thing to say! You were delusional that night, honey. I never meant to hurt you. I just wanted to console you, is all.
CM: Yeah! After you hit me with a shot of bear spray!
LM: ‘You’re all alike, you bitches!’ Don’t you remember saying that about me and Mom, down in the kitchen, before you came up to lovingly attack me?
CM: [Getting angry] I was grieving, for christ’s sake! Out of my mind with grief!
LM: And breaking down my bedroom door was part of your grieving process?
CM: I’m not that man anymore, Lucinda. I’ve got over my grief.
LM: I’m happy for you. Now, stop calling me.
CM: How come you keep saying that? Don’t you want to be a family again?
LM: You’re not part of my family, Father. Never will be. Stop calling me.
CM: I regret having said it out loud, dear, but you really are a bitch! Aren’t you?
LM: Stop calling me, and you won’t have to put up with my bitchiness anymore.
CM: I’ll never stop calling you, hon. I’ll never stop trying to pull our family back together.
LM: [Listening, waiting.]
CM: I’m a grandfather now. I want to see my grandson. Get to know him.
LM: [Listening, waiting.]
CM: D’ya hear me! I want to get to know my grandson. Be a grandfather to him.
LM: The same way you were a father to Larry?
CM: I was a good father. Larry needed toughening up. Needed to become a man.
LM: [Angrily] Was spray painting his mural and kicking him half to death inside his tent part of your making ‘a man’ him?
CM: You’re nuts! I never had anything to do with that!
LM: [Listening, waiting.]
CM: You can’t keep me from seeing my grandson! I’ve got rights as his grandfather!
LM: Try to see him and I’ll get a restraining order slapped on your ass before sunset. I’ve still got all the evidence I’d need to make an order stick, and I won’t hesitate to make our sordid details public. There’s no need to keep them secret anymore. If you want to share that bit of family lore with my sisters, go ahead and try me.
Larry’s sisters Lucinda, Loretta and Louise MacDonald, joined by Lucinda’s new best friend Brenda Tanner, have convened over dinner at an outdoor café in Victoria’s Bastion Square. They’re planning Larry’s Celebration of Life. He had sustained serious injuries after being attacked in the parking lot where he was camped out while working on a mural commissioned ‘retrospectively’ by Brenda. His assailant had defaced the mural, which Larry had just completed and dedicated to Lucinda’s son Manny. But that assault wasn’t the cause of death; Larry died of an overdose in a nearby back alley. A homeless person and recognized graffiti artist, Larry had been living on the streets for about five years, after fleeing the haunted house of his and the MacDonald sisters’ abusive father Carl MacDonald…
***
We wouldn’t go for fancy, would leave Larry’s ashes in the provided black plastic, standard issue funeral box. “It’s what he would have wanted,” I argued. “I don’t want to make his death anything other than what it is by putting his remains into a fancy urn or scattering them to the four winds from some mountaintop you can only get to in a frigging helicopter. He’s dead. The cremated contents in that heavy black container we received are all that’s left of him. The only place Larry lives is in our hearts and minds.”
For a minute we sat in silence, immersed in our private thoughts, oblivious to the soundscape of our outdoor café and Wharf Street.
Brenda and my sisters agreed… eventually.
Cheapskates, Echo chided.
I had taken Larry’s cremation tag to a jeweller who fashioned it into a necklace. My sisters bridled when I showed it to them. “That’s morbid!” Louise made a face. I teased her for looking like an emoji. “Who’s going to wear it?” Loretta wanted to know.
Weird, Echo jumped into the fray.
“It’s symbolic,” I explained. “I want people to ask your question, Loretta; and I want them to cringe like you just did, Louise. Consider it a piece of functional art, a sort of fashion statement…”
I quavered, near tears. They backed off, giving me time and space.
“Who’s going to wear the medallion?” Brenda quietly insisted after a while.
“Good question,” I conceded. “I want everyone to wear it, I suppose.”
Stupid answer, Echo challenged.
I described what I envisioned as Larry’s memorial: a small, round table draped in black; the funeral box on it, elevated by a little pedestal; a commissioned portrait of Larry placed to one side; the cremation-tag necklace on the other; the whole display positioned in front of Larry’s mural—we had already determined that Larry’s life would be celebrated there, and that his temporary shrine would be placed next to his dedication of the wall to Manny.
Brenda had commissioned an artist to restore the mural. She told him to begin with the inscription, and ‘continue with your healing strokes from there.’ She also instructed him to time-lapse the restoration with a camera located on the opposite side of the lot. “We’ll record a piece of art in the remaking to share with the world,” she said. “Love defies entropy,” she proclaimed mysteriously.
Larry would have appreciated the ironic subtext of us using his remains to remind mourning celebrants that, As long as there are eyes to see and minds to remember, this work of art will be envisioned—it will not fade. For him, the fact that eyes develop cataracts and eventually go blind, and memories are ephemeral as plucked harp strings, didn’t constrain or limit consciousness. Larry believed in a universal spirit—chords that resonate and are forever resurrected in the network of awakened, believing souls.
God! And I thought I was the certified philosopher in the family!
I didn’t dare attempt to describe the twisted intellectual rhizomes he’d germinated in the rootball of my infested brain, but I did want to weave what I could make of them subliminally into Larry’s celebration of life, which we were planning. The thought of discussing his memorial indoors stifled me, made me feel like a wrapped mummy in a stone crypt. En plein air, I insisted. Whether out of compassion or enthusiasm, I couldn’t say, but they agreed, and we met at Bastion Square.
It was a bright, sunny evening. We shared an unspoken sense of guilt to be enjoying the breeze, the vibrance of passing traffic, the restaurant chatter and clatter, drinks, good food and—yes—even merriment while we were making arrangements to say our last goodbyes to the canister of ashes that had once been our brother and new-found friend. Larry would have forgiven us. But there was another foreboding source of darkness creeping across the pavement as the westering sun declined and shadows lengthened—Father?
What should we do about Father?
Loretta and Louise didn’t know he had tried to rape me; they only knew we’d had a ‘terrible row’ and that I’d left for good—‘and good riddance’ he’d complained. “If she wasn’t my daughter, I’d report her to the police,” he told them. “She attacked me with a fucking knife!”
I never corrected his version of events. How could I tell my sisters they were living under the same roof as a pervert who had tried to rape one of his own daughters? How could I report him, and have social services step in and shuffle my sisters and brother off into foster care? I did what I had to—warned the old bastard to keep his hands off them, and did my best to keep in touch with my siblings. Brenda was the only one at the table who I’d confided to about my father’s attempted rape; she shot me a warning glance when Loretta asked, “What do we do about Father?”
My whole body cramped. I wanted to shout, How can you even ask that? But managed to keep my mouth clamped shut. Hadn’t they made the connection between Father’s drive-by and the night-time assault on our brother? Wasn’t it obvious that his vicious upbringing had permanently damaged Larry—that he’d verbally battered our brother from the moment Larry had offered the first tentative, shy glimpses of his artist’s soul? Couldn’t they see what a FUCKING HYPOCRISY it would be to invite that piece of shit to my brother’s celebration of life?
“Of course they know all that, hon,” Brenda consoled later. “But they’re prepared to give him the benefit of their doubts; you don’t have any doubts. He destroyed any possibility of doubt that night he tried to rape you.”
In the end, before we left the café, we’d agreed that one of my sisters would invite Father, but that they’d also deliver a letter warning him not to approach me, or my son Manny, or to try communicating with us in any way. I’d walked to Bastion Square, but didn’t feel up to the return trip home and asked Brenda if she’d give me a lift. I felt defeated, knew I’d be increasingly fretful and oppressed at the prospect of meeting the real-life-ogre who had tried to rape me—my father. I wanted Brenda’s companionship. She walked me up to the penthouse instead of dropping me off out front on Oswego Street. I imagined her tucking me in and kissing me goodnight on the forehead before she crept out of my boudoir. Silly me! For the one-and-only first time, she stayed the night.
Talk about The Agonies and the Ecstasies of Lucinda MacDonald’s fucked up life!
Homeless street artist Larry MacDonald is camped in the parking lot of the Inner Worlds Gallery in downtown Victoria. He has just completed a mural on the gallery’s external back wall, and has been commissioned to do another by gallery owner Brenda Tanner. The lot is enclosed behind a locked wrought iron gate. That’s not enough to make Larry feel secure though… nothing can make him safe from the threatening spectre of his abusive, tyrannical father, Carl MacDonald…
Imagine yourself a gentle spirit, camped—with permission—in a downtown parking lot. You don’t know what time it is because you don’t own a watch or a mobile to keep track of your days, hours, and minutes. You’re alone, a tiny node that exists in an infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent network of connected conscious being.
Something has awakened you, and you’re instinctively alarmed, alert to every sound emerging out of the darkness. Might have been nothing, you think. But your body remains tensed, your breathing paused, heart thumping. Possibly an imagined sound? The fading clank of metal against metal conjured in a dream, a nightmare.
It’s gone. But you listen intently, trying to detect its echo merged into the background noise of urbanity: the hum of electricity through a faulty circuit; the distant throb of a motorcycle…
There! No mistaking it this time. It’s a sound you’ve heard before, one that matches a pattern most people would recognize, the sound of a chain rattling as it’s removed from a wrought iron gate and dropped to the ground.
Brenda? That doesn’t make sense. Why would she be here?
Another sound torques your anxiety, the unmistakable rattle of metal wheels on concrete, the gate opening. Not all the way. Just wide enough for a person to sneak through.
Should you unzip your tent door-flap and look to see who it is? Would you be able to identify them in the darkness? Should you shout, Who’s there? Let them know their trespass is not going unobserved.
No! Best to remain perfectly still, to pretend you don’t exist. Be invisible!
The scuffle of boots on gravel moves toward the far end of the Inner World Gallery’s back wall. Then there’s the sound of something being dropped to the ground, a backpack. Its owner rummages around, grunting, annoyed. You know who’s making the rooting, grunting sounds, but refuse to let that knowledge surface. It swims like a shark in its murky, unconscious depths; if you name the source of your terror, you will make it real.
Another sound sends tremors of panic and agony shooting through your nervous system. It’s the sound of a steel ball ricocheting against the inner wall of a shaken spray paint canister. Nooo! Your spirit shrivels like tissue paper thrown into a flame. Nooo! You want to block your ears. But you have to listen. It’s your day of judgment; refusing to give it voice by not listening would be a sin. You will be punished for that act of rebellion. It’s your duty to pay attention to the sputtered hiss of retribution. You will be chastised for denial.
Again and again, the canisters are shaken, the paint sprays. What colours is he spewing to obliterate my art? You ask the question as you infold, arms hugging knees, head tucked, eyes shut. ‘Whimpering like a whipped dog,’ as he would describe it.
Does it even matter which frequencies of light would be absorbed, which reflected in this vandal’s aerosol, his obliterating mist? It’s all black, and white, and shades of grey out there in his monochrome universe. His is the joyless satisfaction of a nihilist, of one who measures his stature by the piles of rubble and mounds of corpses he leaves behind.
I hate you! You want to shout. But you bottle and cork your rage because you know it’s pathetic. It would only fan the vitriolic fuel of his pleasure. He knows you’re helpless. You cannot stand up to him. Your petulance would only prove how successful he’s being with his torture.
Then the spraying stops. He turns, his boots rasping in the gravel, and faces your fabric shelter. He’s breathing heavily—not because he’s exhausted by his acts of desecration, but because he’s inflamed and needs more oxygen to sustain his obliterating passion. His boot smashes into the side of your tent with the force of a boulder dropped out of the sky. He’s stomping, kicking, trampling, an avenging demon come to destroy you. Not content to feel the collapse of willowy poles and fabric underfoot, this pulverizing Shiva continues his Dance of Destruction until he’s stomping and battering the human shape within its flattened shroud.
Only then do you comprehend the true nature of his furious assault—that he has come to kill you.
‘Stupid’ isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you’ve been launched like a rocket out the driver’s-side door of the Volkswagen beetle you were driving down the 401. Nor does it come to mind as you watch the car tumble down the embankment beneath you, shards of glass and assorted artifacts flying out the open doors and smashed windows. Or when you notice the tires spinning frantically as if they might gain some sort of traction mid-air through its demolition rollover.
It doesn’t occur to you at the apogee of your wingless flight as you arc into your death-defining decsent, wondering which boulder is going to smash your head, or crooked tree limb run you through.
The word that first comes to mind is, “Yaaaaah!”
But you don’t even get a chance to scream out loud. You want to, but time has downshifted into slow-mo, and you can’t get your vocal cords to synchronize with the stretched wavelength of your fatal trajectory. Your death cry is stifled. You’re a giant bean bag that’s been tossed off the back of a truck.
Later, once you’re sure you have survived, you will review millisecond by millisecond the instant replay of your flight. Then you will have time to insert thoughts into your version of events, pause and shuffle the sequence into frames that might be numbered like a book’s: Stupid-Page 1, Stupid-Page 2, and so on.
It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning, middle and end of such an episode. Stupid-Page 1 could have been pegged to the day me and my girlfriend stuck out our thumbs and headed west, on the first leg of our hitch-hiking odyssey from Montreal to the West Coast of Vancouver Island. Or when we piled out of the car after our first ride and stuffed half our worldly belongings into a culvert to ‘lighten the load.’ Or when we decided the load would be even lighter if we went our separate ways because each of us came to think the other stupid in some way-shape-or-form.
Let’s fast-forward to a coordinate somewhere between Toronto and Cornwall Ontario on the last leg of my solo return trip. It’s five or six o’clock in the morning and I’m already on the shoulder of the 401, hitching. A guy in a faded blue VW Bug pulls over and offers me a ride. But before I can get in the opened passenger side door, he says, “Hey, I’ve been driving all night. Can you take over for a while?”
That’s Page-1 in his stupid portfolio; my acceptance of his request Page-101 in mine. I mean, would you ask a complete stranger, who looked like he’d just climbed out of a ditch—because in fact, he had—to drive your car while you took a nap? But pots can’t call kettles black; would you take him up on the offer if you didn’t even have a learner’s permit and the only time you’d actually driven a car you were sitting in your father’s lap?
Don’t answer.
“Never driven a standard?” my sleep-deprived companion asked when I tried to grind the shifter into first. “Push down the clutch… That’s the pedal on the left… now slip the shifter into first.” Being a quick learner doesn’t disqualify you from the ranks of stupid. I got the hang of the ‘H’ sequence after a couple of times through, and my instructor settled in for his snooze.
Stupid isn’t a word that has any significance in a squirrel’s lexicon. Some homo sapiens think of them as stupid, but those boastful members of my own species are stupid themselves if they believe their IQ goes up in reverse proportion to the amount they downgrade the intelligence of another. Just try living off the land even for a week, eating nothing but acorns and berries, with no roof over your head, and predators crouched behind every bush and you’ll be able to make a more informed comment about who’s stupid and who isn’t.
However, squirrels do have a blind spot when it comes to cars. So it was I found myself barreling down the fast lane, bearing down on a black squirrel that was hippity-hopping across the highway toward the ditch on the other side. I eased into the slow lane—where I should have been in the first place—and hoped he’d remain frozen until I zoomed by. No such luck. He hopped right in front of me at the last second…
Being the smarty-pants you are, I’m sure you can guess what happened next. I eased further to the right, then farther again when the squirrel continued its suicidal progress. And again, until the passenger-side tires hit gravel. The VW lurched right, I overcorrected left, next thing I knew we were skidding sideways down the highway, a spray of gravel rattling under the floorboards and the front tires screeching over the asphalt.
My companion woke up with a start and looked out the front window, confused that the scenery was sliding by side to side instead of scrolling toward some vanishing point up the highway. I’ve lost count of the number of stupids that could be counted in that lick of time. All I can say is, none of them were the squirrel’s fault. It was just being a squirrel.
“What the…” my co-pilot managed.
Before he could complete the expletive, the back fender of the VW hit a post someone had carelessly planted in a spot they might have expected an errant, out-of-control Volkswagen to be sliding by. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! That was enough to tip us, sending the V-Dub into the clattering, shattering roll that would eject me out of my seat… no seatbelt, stupid… into my graceful arc.
I could describe my flight as a form of kinetic ballet; it did have a certain elegance to it if you could ignore the likely denouement. In retrospect, my slow-motion high dive seemed to be taking place in air that had thickened to the consistency of water—it felt as if I was swimming through the sky…
That ethereal sensation ended with a thud.
Next thing I knew I woke up in an ambulance, being prepped for a trip to the hospital.
Neither me nor my companion were seriously injured in the crash. And I do believe the squirrel survived unscathed. Our gurneys were parked side by side in the hospital emergency ward. His last words were: “Don’t tell them who was driving.” I deduced from the instruction that he had been tossed from his tumbling vehicle too, and preferred to accept full responsibility for my share of the overall stupidity.
I can’t say I learned my lesson that day… but that’s another story… well several of them, actually.
Author, Craig Spence Reader, Craig Spence Production by Books Unbound
In this excerpt from Entrapment Lucinda MacDonald, her sisters Loretta and Louise, and their new friend Brenda Tanner celebrate their partnership as the guardian angels of Larry, the MacDonalds’ damaged brother, who Brenda has commissioned to do a mural on the outside back wall of her Inner Worlds gallery. It’s a transitional moment for Lucinda, and she breaks down…
Larry accepted Brenda’s offer.
“He bobbed his head and mumbled something like, ‘Sounds good,’ as if he was speaking from under a blanket with a mouthful of peanut butter,” she laughed. “I said to hell with it, grabbed him by the shoulders and hugged him hard, like a mother gorilla. He went stiff as a poker of course, but at least he didn’t struggle.”
“What part of him went stiff?” Louise joked.
We four hooted, raising our glasses in a toast to success. The ringing of our crystalline cluster-clink—barely audible over the rumble of passing traffic out on Wharf Street and the clatter of dishes in the sidewalk café—marked a beginning and an ending. Larry, dysfunctional genius that he was, had brought us MacDonald women back together as family.
Til death do you part, Echo intruded.
Shut the fuck up!
And, because of him, I had met Brenda, another love of my life…
I’ll shut the fuck up for now, Echo grumped.
And forever hold your peace! I snarked.
But it is getting kind of crowded in that heart locket of yours, don’t you think?
I said shut the fuck up!
When a glass breaks it makes a tickling sound. Hearts break silently within.
If you were real, I’d throttle you.
I am real…
“Lucinda?”
Brenda frowned, puzzled; my sisters looked on, concerned.
“You okay?”
“Oh!” I flustered. “I’m just a little overwhelmed.”
I wanted to take her hand, to kiss her a second time—or at least be kissed by her. I hated myself for feeling so desperately passionate, weakened by our celebratory moment. So pathetic!
“It’s going to be okay,” Brenda massaged my shoulder and the back of my neck.
“Let go,” Louise consoled.
“What?” I didn’t understand. What was I supposed to let go of?
“All these years, Luce, you’ve been the one who’s held us together. You’ve been our centre of gravity. Let go. We’re all grown up now. We’re fine. Even Larry, in his weird way, is becoming who he’s meant to be…” She paused; I waited. “You don’t have to be at the centre anymore, Luce; we’re all of us in mutual orbit, okay?”
I bowed my head, trembling, grateful, not wanting them to see me cry.
Loretta rounded the table, pressed her lips close to my ear, and whispered from behind, “Watch me spin, Sis.”
She flew away from us like a startled bird, weaving her way through and around the café tables, twirling out into Bastion Square. She couldn’t pirouette on pointe because she was wearing her sequinned thrift-store sandals. It didn’t matter. She floated effortlessly up and down the steps, buoyed by a musical spirit I couldn’t quite hear, but which I felt in every vibrant bone and nerve of my body. Some people stopped to watch her ballet; others hurried on, pretending not to notice.
“Oh my god!” Brenda gasped.
Gorgeous! Echo sighed.
“That’s because of you, Sis!” Loretta embraced me from behind when she’d flitted back to our table. “It’s all down to you!”
In this excerpt from Lucinda’s journal she and her sisters approach Inner Worlds Gallery owner Brenda Tanner to see if they can secure a safer lifestyle for their brother Larry. He’s been living on the street, earning money doing sketches and gaining a reputation as a graffiti artist. He’s pitched his tent in the gallery’s parking lot and started a mural on its back wall—getting enthusiastic approval from Brenda after the fact. The sisters want to talk to Brenda about Larry’s well-being, but Lucinda has someting else on her mind, too…
If Larry couldn’t be lured off the street, we’d make his homeless existence as safe and comfortable as possible. We approached Brenda with our plan because we wanted to do whatever we could to secure his place in her parking lot. “Of course he can stay there!” she countered. “Homelessness isn’t the same thing as placelessness. Larry MacDonald has a place right here!” She patted her left breast. “As long he wants to make my parking stall his home, he’s welcome. “In fact, I’ve already talked to the tenants and owner of the building on the other side of my lot. I want to commission Larry to do a second mural on their wall. If they agree to it, and he accepts, he’ll be camped out in his patch of gravel for at least a year. Probably more.” God! I wished in that moment I could stop loving Brenda so much. But I couldn’t help thinking and feeling like a romantic poet whenever I found myself within the ambit of her radiant being, a glow that suffused my waking and sleeping dreams. Shamelessly, I took advantage of her enthusiastic announcement to hug her; and she took advantage of my taking advantage by kissing me on the neck stepping back from that sudden embrace. I didn’t dare exchange a glance with my sisters, who had witnessed that subtle collapse of my known universe. I knew they knew; didn’t want them to know that I knew they knew, which would have entailed confused and embarrassing elaboration. Some kisses are ephemeral—token gestures of affection that evaporate the instant they are bestowed; others stay with you, an intoxicant infusing your blood. I’ve never gotten over Brenda’s first kiss.
Went for a walk the other day discovering this and that along the way glimpses into Chemainus town this sacred precinct, unceded ground.
Met the man, wears a leather hat shares cheerful bytes. Eclectic chat. A joke, a tale, a fervent proclamation ‘bout living in the heart of this greatest nation.
Peered into dug foundations in Waterwheel Park where gleaming inspirations will support a brand new arch is this a pathway to reconciliation— footings to rebuild a truly greater nation.
Next came a woman and her Afghan hound dog loping grandly, eastward bound, I remembered the ghost of a lost best friend whose graceful gallop met a sudden end.
Poked around in a book box, wanting a read, when a voice from behind jokingly agreed not every concoction of facts into fiction lays claim the title of best-selling diction.
Then a youthful voice haled from a yard, a teen holding up an old rusted shard, thinking a geezer from ancient times, might house recollections it vaguely mimed.
Scanned from on high our inland sea, its surface calmed, not a notion of breeze, ships aglitter in a bright setting sun, pointing to oceans from whence they had come.
Returned to my doorstep the other day. Just where I’d been? I couldn't say because every step we take is taken into a world that’s newly awakened.
I didn’t say it out loud, of course—not right away—and can’t determine to this day if the thought was true. I mean sincere in all its dimensions, down to the place where sole smacks concrete reality. But it was the best I could come up with on the spot, and even though I didn’t voice the sentiment, she heard me. That’s the trick I believe: Think things before speaking. Sometimes keep them as thoughts forever because you’re bashful, perhaps. Or maybe because the person you’re interested in is perfect and you could only detract from that by wheedle-wording your way into her affections.
I had instinctively done an up and down of the sandals’ occupant—that checkout scan we males of the species do when attracted by something potentially sexual in our peripheral vision. But it was her footwear—and I must confess, her feet—my roving eye locked onto. Her toes were painted pink!
Not gaudily, in that slapdash way you sometimes see and feel embarrassed about—usually for bubblegum teens. The polish had been applied with artistry. Details like that say something, don’t they? She had a conception of self that was bold and subtle, I figured.
So maybe I was indulging just a little. But it’s okay to try and fathom why someone’s special, isn’t it? And at first, we have to draw assumptions from observations as seemingly insignificant as pedicure, don’t we? You’re a liar if you say no. The forensics of love are based upon minute chips of evidence, hinting at theories made up as we go.
To me, the convex surfaces of her nails were intriguing as conch shells turned inside out. Can you imagine such a thing? My eyes stuck on the tops of her toes for a breath or two, then—without my thinking, without conscious intent—zoomed in on her sandals, recording every facet of those elegant slippers.
Even as my eyes went about their rogue’s work, though, part of me realized there was nothing so very remarkable about Gloria’s sandals… aside from the fact that she was in them. I can think of a thousand movie stars and a thousand more princesses who would have turned up their noses if asked to wriggle their dainty nether digits into such a pair of Walmart flip-flops. But on Gloria’s feet! Oh my!
“Oh my!” as grandmother would cry when occasion warranted. Of course, her delight was usually over events as homey as cherry pie coming out of the oven or particularly brilliant works of crayon art, not over anything so exotic as the footgear of a complete stranger. For grandmother, agape wasn’t so much about miracles as discovering the miraculous in everyday things—about seeing through the veil of ordinary and triggering suspirations as emphatic as a last gasp.
By the way, mentioning Gloria’s name right now makes everything from here on in non-sequitur. I didn’t know her name at this point in our story. True, I was cultivating an intimate relationship with the bone structure and musculature of her feet, the same way Toto might have got to know Dorothy before they ventured into Oz. But that’s not the same as knowing a body’s name, is it? Love works backwards. We fall into it, then double back, tracking down the meanings and consequences of ’til death do us part.
I’ve broken sequence because I can’t bear talking about Gloria as ‘her’ or ‘she’ without giving name to those theoretical references. I have christened her even though a name at that point would have been as naively symbolic as graffiti sprayed anonymously on whitewashed stucco, or rote declarations carved into the trunks of trees or the planks of park benches. At that point in our relationship, her name would have been a catch-all of fantasies. A concatenation of dark eyes, long black hair… an aura you could best see through eyes half-closed.
In truth, if Gloria had dematerialized before I got a chance to talk to her—whisked out of her sandals by powers unknown into some sci-fi Nirvana beyond the frequencies of daytime TV—nothing would have seemed remarkable about her footwear left on the corner of Quadra and Hillside. Other than the fact that the sandals were there, placed carefully on the cracked concrete as if the intersection were a portico into some alternative dimension and she had been called away suddenly. Barefoot.
The thing about Gloria is she even stands with her shoes neatly placed, and she never just kicks her footgear off. She’s neat that way. Fastidious. It makes me laugh. And because of her, I place my work boots carefully on the mat inside the vestibule door too—toes pointing toward the wall, heels knocked together. She’s aware of details like that so it pains me to bring disorder into our lives, especially when it’s so easy to do things right.
There’s meaning to the precise placement of feet on a sidewalk. Someone needs to see that. Imagine yourself in the presence of a goddess. You’ve been schlepping your way through life down at the pit, a latter-day Sisyphus crunching stones into various grades of gravel, then suddenly she’s there, and you know sheis a goddess, that she already knows everything she needs to. What do you say to her? What’s your conversation starter?
In a way, Gloria was aware of every rhinestone glued to those bargain basement sandals of hers. Not individually, of course, but as elements of a sensory field, if you will. I wondered which tiny mirror I might have been reflected in, standing beside her, my bike held between us like a barrier. What did she think of this guy? Of his long hair and never-quite-matured beard, his knobby tired bike? She hadn’t even glanced my way—a sensible rebuke. But I did want her to appreciate the nobility of my feelings… that if the sun could be positioned just so behind me, I too would glow with my own halo effect.
I glimpsed her profile, then surveyed the intersection for clues. Perhaps there were points of convergence, shards of data that proved we dwelt in overlapping dimensions. Which of the drab architectural features could I point to and say, There, that’s us. The San Remo Market Deli & Café? The Salvation Army Community & Family Centre, across Hillside? The Money Mart (real people fast cash) diagonally opposite? The Sally Ann thrift store on the west side of Quadra? The garbage receptacles and bike racks at every corner to dispose of stuff we no longer valued and lock up the things we did?
We were none of that, and perhaps—without knowing it—denial was the point of convergence I had in mind, the notion that we were something other… or could be.
No kidding! I said it out loud. Breathlessly. Disguised as a brash joke, because any second now the light on Quadra would wink green and the little silhouette that says walk would let her get away, and I couldn’t let that happen without at least a memory of me—strange and deformed as it might seem—hankering after her. Things had spiralled into a place where an inkling of madness is the only reasonable state of mind, not stark raving lunacy, but a sort of emotional Pi, never quite defined, always panicked by another increment of yearning.
If only we had it in us to feel that way about every living thing, we would truly be incarnations of our imagined gods.
The light changed. Gloria stepped off the sidewalk into the intersection. I walked beside her, thinking: This is it. It’s finished. She still hadn’t glanced at me. I studied her profile for signs. She wasn’t ready to offer any, and how could I blame her? But I took comfort in the fact that we were walking in the same direction, that the inaudible pat of her sandals on the pavement didn’t seem hurried or doubtful. She was willing to abide my company at least.
Gloria strode on like the dancer she is, back straight, black pantaloons fluttering in the breeze, pleated jacket conforming precisely to her slight, angular build. Did I imagine it, the faintest hint of a smile turning up her lips? I’m not sure, but the words rushed out of me anyway, when I saw what I took to be a cue, as if I’d been waiting to blurt my intentions for just-about-ever. “Maybe you won’t take it wrong if I walk with you a-ways?”
Creep! Is that what she was thinking? She stopped, looked straight at me, her head swivelling round like a security camera on a pole, eyes locking on. This is it, I thought for the umpteenth time. It’s finished.
Then she smiled and laughed out loud, and… Oh my God! Oh my!
We plan on having kids someday but there’s still lots of time to think about how I might answer if one of the little rascals ever asks, when they’ve attained the age of reason or at least a mature state of curiosity: “Hey, Dad, how did you and Mom first meet and fall in love?”
Perhaps, if I framed it as a joke, I could admit to my temporary state of foot-fetishism at the corner of Hillside and Quadra while I was on my way to the pit and Gloria off to her studio. Or maybe I could fast-forward to our first date, on the evening of that first day, at Café Fantastico, just a couple of blocks away from our point of departure. I paid; Gloria objected; we laughed at the clumsiness of it all—our perfectly memorable ineptitudes.
To be honest, I was amazed she showed up at all or that I’d asked her to when we parted ways that morning, me pedalling down Bay Street, heading for the pit; her, carrying on up Quadra. Gloria walks without making a sound. It’s like she rolls the soles of her feet through each step, feeling the ground beneath her, sensing its contours, its tilt, its flaws and fractures. Silence is what she leaves behind when she walks away from you or out of a room. Don’t get me wrong, she’s not an angel or anything, and I’m not a worshiper. But that silence she leaves in her wake? Your instinct is to fill it with thoughts of her.
The circular patio table we chose on the sidewalk outside Café Fantastico had a rippled glass top, so I could still make out Gloria’s feet after we sat down. They became a point of reference—their muscular arch, perfectly articulated toes andmeticulously painted nails a sort of permissible zone of psychic gravity, which assured me the rest of her was still there, that she was real in an incomprehensible way. There’s a difference between comprehending someone and figuring them out, I think. Comprehending is like hugging your partner, knowing you’ll always be wondering how amazing she is; figuring her out is like taking her apart so you can adjust the mechanics of her soul – like tuning a bicycle.
A lot of my friends have got round to asking me in one way or another why I majored in philosophy at UVic. They don’t come right out and say: “Hey, you could be doing a hell of a lot better than crunching gravel down at the pit if only you’d go into law or something, or maybe take a few more PSYCH courses, get a master’s? Get into counselling? Or teaching? Heck, why not try for a PhD in something or other; you’ve got the smarts.” And maybe they’re right; maybe I will someday. But all that misses the point – the vanishing point of our existence, you might say. I can’t map this out in a straight line, like if I was a crow flying from here to there, and landing on a lamppost in the very epicentre of Nirvana. Life doesn’t move in straight lines or elegant curves that can be described by some sort of derived calculus.
I didn’t know it at the time but took philosophy so I could understand the meaning of Gloria’s feet, seen through the rippled glass of a patio table. Intimacy is the sudden awareness that your partner is too beautiful to take in at a glance, that you have to look away, take time to grow yourself into it, expand your ability to appreciate every facet of her being… now there’s a word that takes me back to the Big Bang of prenatal existence.
There’s a theory I’ve been trying to work out since I wore the funny cap and gown at my UVic graduation: I call it bracketed infinity. Essentially, it means you can choose any two points, or moments, or encapsulated surfaces, and the space-time-continuum between your arbitrary beginning and end will be infinite. We divide up our experiences as if they were exponentially duplicating editions of ourselves evolving through some process of mitosis, taking place beneath the painted exterior of a Russian doll. But every manifestation of me or you is complete, whole, infinite.
Get it?
Can’t say as I’ve figured it out yet myself, so you’re smarter than me if you have… All I know is, when I wake up beside Gloria, and we smile, my future, past and present areright now, in the moment.
Manny, a youth who has been abused and betrayed, ends his life by overdosing in a squalid back alley. This reading is excerpted from his mother, Lucinda’s, journal. She did everything in her power to sheild him from the undermining, demeaning influences of their world. In this reading she recollects her own earliest memory of a man she would learn to fear, then hate, and utterly distrust—her father.
The bird of paradise does not live in lush green tropic forests, doesn't stroke with flashing wings a Caribbean sky.
But she might.
This species does not trill her heartfelt, joyous anthems from a leafy, palm-treed hillside under a dazzling, foreign sun.
But she could.
This mystic creature you will find in the shimmering, shushing fabric in the irridescent patterns, in the brilliant woven mists of an imaginative mind...
